O Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie

"O bury Me Not", also known as "The Dying Cowboy", starts out as "The Ocean Burial", an 1839 poem by Edward Hubbell Chapin, in which a young sailor dies and is buried at sea.

It resurfaced in the 1870s with the ocean transformed into the American prairie and the sailor into a dying cowboy. Authorship is variously attributed with the most commonly cited reference being Jack Thorp's Songs of the Cowboys , 1921, in which he attributes it to "H. Clemens, Deadwood, Dakota" with a publishing date of 1872.

There are several tunes in both major and minor keys.

I learned this decidedly minor-key, hexatonic version from Hedy West. It lacks the sixth scale degree and is therefore playable in tunings intended for the Aeolian and Dorian modes. I play it melody-drone style in Eeaa tuning, which starts a Dorian scale on the fourth fret of the paired melody strings.